Sunday, December 04, 2011

"Far" by Coheed and Cambria Demonstrates Words Juxtaposed against Pictures

A continuation of thinking about irony.

When the scene has little to do with the words being said it produces a different effect than that produced by scene and words agreeing. Words and pictures impact us differently. Where words cause us to think and attempt to think in reasoned lines, pictures can evoke instinct, emotion, and ambiguity or diversity in conclusions. Which becomes interesting when the pictures are described in our stories. We require words to show the pictures. In scene setting, our attempt is always to generate some sense of solidity with the slippery words that we have selected as our tool.

Hopefully, our description seems solid. We might all describe the same castle. The stones--the grit--the icicles--hopefully, we all succeed in conveying the coarse, cold touch, immense silence, the chalky smell of mortar; hopefully we give a distinct image of castle. We might opt to use language that is vague, soft, weak. Hopefully, the objective image "castle" becomes communicated anyway, though we might leave the audience thinking about jello, or something.

It's a thought. The ambiguity of language is our tool. If you want to make an institution look philosophically weak and physically impregnable, you might describe their Nazi architectural style with soft-sounding syllables and ambiguous words. A strong description ought to give the objective solidity of scene setting and, through word choice, it ought also to juxtapose an ambiguity.